Progress on "Adriane"

I began writing “Adriane” because of a dear friend from the Basque side of Southern France, and inspiration for the sequel to “A Taxi Romance”, who grew up in the region of Biarritz. My story was originally to be about drug addiction and recovery but it soon took a sidestep into an entirely different direction as  I delved into the background of her fictional forbears. I let my imagination run wild about the French Resistance that was strong in Southern France during WWII and, as I researched, I came upon a deeper understanding of the Basque Separatist resistance after the fall of Madrid in Spain against Franco. Throughout my youth, from the comfortable suburbs of Spokane Valley, I’d heard of Basque Separatists. The subsequent years after the war and the USA’s relationship with Franco’s dictatorship from the Eisenhower years on had not entered my consciousness until I began writing “Adriane”. I had never heard of, the prison Carabanchel or the resistance hero, Ramon Vila, a.k.a. Cara Quimada. Peculiar though, I invented the character of Alesander because I wanted a loner, independent of the Communists and the Anarchists. I envisioned Alesander as a lone wolf anarchist ranging the hills of the Pyrenees but I had no idea that there actually was one in Ramon Vila who had single handedly stuck a thorn in the Franco regime’s side throughout the fifties until he was killed in the early sixties. His specialty was blowing up electrical transmission towers in the Pyrenees and targeted assassinations of key Francoist militia death squad leaders. It just figured that there had to be independents in the resistance after all the disillusionment with the organized Anarchists, Socialists, Maoists and Stalinists of the early fifties. Alesander Gotson is an entirely fictional character that led me into this story rather than the other way around as he took me through the Pyrenees of Southern France and Spain from the fall of Madrid in the Civil War to the late fifties under the oppression of Franco. Furthermore, I had no idea how oppressive the Franco Regime had been and how long after his death clear into the 1980s that his policies continued in Spain. In particular the adoption of children born in prison to so-called miscreants… or, as Basque Separatists were referred to as “common bandits” made it into the narrative of this tale.

Carabanchel

   Alesander eyes adjusted to the light in his cell. He had been led there after his capture without the usual interview and preliminary torture of the infamous Carabanchel. He hadn’t been searched. He still had on his own shirt, boots, trousers and even a box of matches, “This is good.” He said as though there was someone else to hear him… then he lit a match to check out his new abode. His mind was calm… his senses sharp… he was always and at all times centered. A cockroach scurried from the revealing light.
“Say, little friend, you will be here long after I’m gone… should I make it ‘til morning we shall be friends.” The light from the match faded and he laughed. Then his thoughts turned to where he sat and whether or not he’d ever get out.

   “Do you ask, what do I mean, make it ‘til morning?”

   He paused, as though expecting an answer, “No, my friend, I will likely be shot before morning and then your brothers, the worms, can do with me what they will.”
 
   He then took off his boots, tucked them under his head to make a pillow of them and drifted off to sleep.
 
   He slept soundly, waking shortly before hearing the clanging of steel doors and the sound of boots coming towards his cell outside the door. The metallic jangling from the turning of the keys scraped and scratched against the walls of his skull. From behind their orbs his eyes ached from the light cascading into the door as it creaked open until the shadow cast by the guard entering the cell gave his eyes relief from the harsh light for a minute and allowed them time to adjust.

   The guard gestured a get up motion, “You can leave your boots.”

   Alesander rose up, padded barefoot out of his cell and turned to say, “Good-bye, my little friend.”
 
   The guard took him by a shoulder, putting Alesander’s arm behind him in position for hand cuffs. He was led up several hallways and into the administrative part of the prison with rooms of clerks and the sound of typewriters. He thought it peculiar that he felt embarrassed at being barefoot as his feet padded along on the cold, polished, linoleum. Then he was put in a small sparse room furnished with space for only two chairs and a bare table. Mind still and no anticipation or expectation, Alesander was ready for this. He had been ready since the old days and now, after decades in the Pyrenees, interment camps in France and two wars, counting the barricades of Madrid, he had known he was living on borrowed time.
 
   The door opened to the vision of a tall man in a pinstriped suit entered with a file in his hands. He pulled the other chair to the opposite side of the table without a greeting of any kind. The two sat silently for several minutes before the tall man spoke.
 
   “Alesander Gotson,’ he slid a pack of Lucky Strikes across the Formica top of the table.
 
   “No thanks, I don’t smoke,” Alesander didn’t take his eyes off the man’s as he declined the offer.
 
   “Too bad,” the man apologetically said, “American cigarettes are about the only help you’ll get from there. You might have died a hero ten years ago but you will die a common bandit now, Mr. Gotson.” The man pushed the thick file across the table before he continued, “I was in Madrid too… perhaps on the opposite side. Open it. This is what we know about your activities up to now.”
   
   “Why should I care what you know?” Alesander asked but not out of curiosity. He knew where this conversation was going. If they wanted him dead he’d be dead.
 
   “Because, Alex, may I call you Alex?” the man didn’t wait for the answer he wasn’t going to get. “I can make things easier if you can tell us what we don’t know… eh?”
 
   Alesander waited to hear more as a practical matter. What did they want to know and what did he need to bury deep in his heart where it would never be found no matter what they decided to do with him? He flipped through the file. It had names… names and wallet size black and white pictures of guidari that had been imprisoned or killed. Red check marks were aside the names of those he knew were dead. Others had blue checks… He noted but dared not pause at one of Iniga… dear Iniga with the smatchet. Some went back as far as Madrid and the Aran valley… bitter sweet memories… in and out of safe houses from the hills of Leon to the Catalonian coastal plains with the infamous el Quito and el Cara Quimada.
 
    The names he read and pictures that passed his gaze were names that evoked good times… of old comrades resting in the crisp fall breezes of the Pyrenees…  of water from a fresh mountain spring cooling his parched throat. He thought he could smell Iniga’s hair and feel the softness of the nape of her neck on his lips. No, he’d have to bury those thoughts. He’d have to bury them for their sake, not his. He was a dead man already as far as his circumstances foretold.
 
   A manicured finger on the picture of Iniga, stopped him as he tried to flip the page before he could turn it. His attempt to hide a flicker of emotion was noted. “If you have any information of her whereabouts…”
 
   “No, she has been out of my life since nineteen fifty when the CNT called her back to France,” he lied and the lie was transparent but he wasn’t going to give up anything so soon.
 
   Very often, back when Alesander was a teen in Madrid, he fantasized about the inevitability of such meetings and perhaps having a Dostoyevskian dialogue between himself and his inquisitor with all the existential philosophical musings bantered about… but even then he knew better. No, it would be a wearing down process lasting several weeks with sensory deprivation and alternating interrogators working in shifts. The most philosophical any of it would come to would be short and sweet… “Tell us more about…” names, dates and places weapons are stashed. Or when those questions were exhausted confessions were extracted via battery cables attached to one’s gonads and so many more low-tech methods of torture. He knew in his heart that he would tell all he had retained… all that had not been obliterated from his mind.
 
   Back in his cell, Alesander gathered his thoughts about why the interview was so short and why so few questions were asked of him in the twelve hours he sat at that table. He knew time was on the side of his keepers and this was only his first twenty-four hours of a day that would end with, either a bullet in the back of his head, or a day that could drag on for months or years. He still had a cyanide capsule in the lining of his trousers and took it out, held it up in the dim light, rolled it a few times between his grimy forefinger and thumbs thinking:  He knew there was little that could be extracted from him of any value now, not only because he operated alone for the most part, but that the safe-houses and most of the people had all fled to the Pyrenees or France. The few who had been with him had already been killed that day. Furthermore, he could distract, mislead or otherwise confuse, whatever information the Civil Guard had on his movements and that he could do more harm than if he snapped the cyanide capsule with his teeth.
 
   “Keep an eye on this, my friend,” he whispered to the cockroach on the wall a foot from where he tucked it into a gap between the steel side of his bunk and the concrete wall where… “Just in case, you never know.”